May 12, 2011

Today I received an unsolicited phone call from a helpful Indian fellow named Karesh, sadly his number was blocked so I cannot share that with you =). He informed me that there were "deadly junk files” on my computer, that were much worse than virii and trojans. He really cared about the health of my PC. He asked me to start the event viewer and showed me all the errors that were on my computer. It was terrifying.

Finally, he informed me that given the age of my PC we needed to “register my license with Microsoft to receive ongoing security assistance from Microsoft Certified Technicians”. He told me that “Microsoft provides two kinds of secure warranty. hardware and software! “ I needed to reactivate this protection…For the low low price of 109$ / year or 388 for 4 years I could get my computer protected from junk files, virii, trojans, and terrorists.

Next step was a LogmeInRescue session. At this time, I told my helpful friend Karesh that my PC had blue screened! Oh no! This bought me a little time to fire up a test virtual machine and Camtasia :). Turns out now a Mr. Kevin Andersen would be helping me, with a trial LogMeIn account :) I wonder if they noticed that my Windows Vista had now all of a sudden become Windows XP? hmmm doesn’t look like it.

This is where it got a little scary. Well not scary for you or I, but for your grandmother or other computer illiterate person. They started digging trough Windows for negative looking things. First they started the Windows certificate store and they highlight a number of revoked by Microsoft. They were even so kind as to highlight these problems!

At this point they brought me to the Quick Resolve website (quickresolve.net) where they were ready to help me enter all my information to pay the fee. At this point, I asked to get four years of coverage. Karesh became quite excited! First I needed to see the “Junk Files” on my PC. Mr. Kevin Andersen started the “Junk Files Viewer” (which you may know as the event viewer). He applied some tricky filters and then BAM. Errors and warnings. Now your grandmother is probably scrambling to find her credit card…

I let Karesh talk for a bit more, ready to stop my VM – finally I had another “Blue Screen” and hung up. Oops ,look I restored a snapshot… Unfortunately the joke is on me..they’ve been calling back over and over and over. <sigh>

At first, I went along for the ride because I figured it might be fun. Soon I started to realize that this will be very convincing to a lot of people, and I started to think that maybe I should write this up in hopes of letting the geeky masses know. So please let the people in your lives who could benefit by knowing about this type of scam know that no one will ever call you at home out of the blue to help you remove junk files…